


Reconstruction

by JustJasper



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Gen, Introspection, omega - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-30
Updated: 2014-11-30
Packaged: 2018-02-27 12:18:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2692718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustJasper/pseuds/JustJasper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two months after the end of the Reaper War, Omega is rebuilding.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reconstruction

**Author's Note:**

> This is quite exposition-y, but I wanted to establish some stuff for writing other fics about post-ME3 Omega.

Aria T'Loak did not have friends. There were people who were useful, people who were entertaining, those she respected, and even people that she _liked_ , but they were not her friends. Friendship did not fit into her plans, and elevating her interpersonal relationships to that level served no real purpose.

There were two people she might have—under duress—considered friends in the true sense of the word, rather than a passing shorthand for people she had associations with. Nyreen Kandros had gone and blown herself up because of some bleeding heart noble ideal, and the memory still smarted. She'd banished everyone from Afterlife the day after reclaiming Omega, and proceeded to tear out Petrovsky's structural changes with her biotics, livid with fury in the knowledge that a woman she had cared about much more than she ought to had died only feet away from the hub of her legacy. She had fought back the threat of prickling tears with destructive force that shook the ground. After she was done, she let the builders come in; Afterlife had to return as the visual centre of Omega for the station to recover, even Nyreen would have conceded that.

She made no move against the Talons when they focused their efforts on rebuilding the residential districts, even if Aria didn't think they should be the priority. She wanted nothing to do with them directly, at least not until she had seen how things played out in the wake of Kandros' death.

Commander Shepard had done much the same thing as the turian, albeit on a much more impressive scale. She'd suspected the energy pulse from the mass relay was related, and her sources—once some of the damage done to infrastructure by the energy discharge had been repaired—told her the Commander had survived somehow, but was still in pieces and unconscious in a Citadel hospital two months after the fact. Whatever Shepard had done had seemed to clear out the last of the Adjutants on the station; her team had intercepted a Blood Pack transmission detailing the discovery of a whole pipe system strewn with their corpses but devoid of signs of battle.

It would seem she owed a lot to both Nyreen and the Commander, and that was not a position she liked to be in. However, Shepard and Nyreen had in common that all their machinations served a 'greater good' that either had no impact on Aria, or was beneficial to her. Destroying the Reapers: beneficial; creating a de-facto security force for Omega that tackled the more disruptive behaviours of the leading mercenary gangs: beneficial. Nyreen was dead so the debt was void. The cost of Shepard's favour to Aria had always been negligible, so it had always been hard to not _like_ the woman. People so rarely had dealings with her that didn't involve trying to squeeze her for all they could gain, even if it rarely went the way they hoped. Shepard, despite having a hero streak a lightyear wide, had never caused waves Aria couldn't deal with in her dealings with Omega. Shepard was-

"Ugh," she made a disgusted sound at herself with the sudden realisation of how much she was dwelling the human woman, as if she _missed_ her. She got up to look out over her club, currently empty but for maybe ten people of various species cleaning with a variety of mechs and machines.

Once every four weeks the drunks were turfed out onto Omega's streets and in flooded the gaggle of cleaners, desperate for the work. It was because Aria hated the stickiness of the floors and the various smells after a few weeks, rather than being worried about the patrons; anyone who came to Omega without recent viral inoculations deserved any disease they picked up. It also served to disrupt ongoing dealings done within Afterlife, and had turned up some good results before now. Whoever handled the cleaners told them they could keep whatever they found as long as they didn't kill each other over it and make more mess, and that coming forward with any finds would mean they'd likely only get a cut of whatever they'd found, but would be remembered by Aria. More than once they'd found information on a forgotten datapad or considerable funds on a lost credit chit, and Aria had found her best hacker in a quarian cleaner who tipped her off about a series of bugs planted in the club.

There were four quarians cleaning today, she noted, watching one of them scale a dancer pole with surprising agility to clean an ominous stain on the ceiling. Not that she minded, she'd happily let an entirely quarian crew clean out this place; they knew how to get things properly sterile out of sheer necessity, but this work detail was high competition, and quarians were low on the Omega food chain.

Presently, the asari commando who had been organising the cleaners approached her box. She was pale blue and heavily scarred across her face, and a damn good shot with a pistol.

"Something turned up, Ultaya?"

"The turian," she said, and held out a credit chit.

"Send him up." She held her omnitool over the chit, bringing up the information, and suppressed a sneer. A lanky turian from the cleaning crew was being led up to her platform, and looked to Aria expectantly.

"You found this chit?" she asked casually—dangerously to anyone with a little sense.

"Yes," the turian nodded. "In one of the vents of the inner passage."

"There's over twenty thousand credits on this," she said, turning it over in her fingers, "you didn't think about just keeping it? I know you were told that you could."

"I thought you would appreciate it."

She felt the urge to tear him apart with her biotics right then, but instead she just fixed him with a stare.

"You thought I'd _appreciate_ it? A chit you bought in here with you?"

The turian's mandibles quivered, and Aria did not break eye contact.

"You should really work on fooling the scanner at the door before trying to earn my favour dishonestly. The only cheat worth respecting is one you don't realise is cheating you."

She sat down on her couch, placing the chit on the low table between them, then settled back with her arms stretched along the back of the sofa, and continued to look at at the turian, who was shaking visibly now.

"As I see it, you have two choices; you leave this chit, and you leave this club, and I forget your face and your name. Or you take back your credits, and I give you an hour's head start before I send someone to kill you."

Twenty thousands credits could go directly into circulation and speed up the dock repairs, which were behind because of funding issues, it was a lot of money to potentially lose; she didn't plan for it to get far if he took the out. The turian looked from Aria to the chit several times, before scrambling for it and fleeing from her sight, tripping on the stairs and sending a human cleaner flying as he barged past.

"Ultaya, have someone clear out his assets, destroy his holdings, get him evicted," Aria waved her hand dismissively. "Do not let him leave the station until he's destitute. Standard fee, plus a four percent cut of his seized worth. They can kill him at their own discretion, but I'm not paying anything extra for a corpse."

She had not made an empty threat, but she had learned that sometimes interesting things could happen when problems were left alive after the first offence.

"I'll organise it right away, boss."

"And replace him with another quarian if there's one out there waiting to get on the cleaning team, I want this place spotless."

"Boss," the asari nodded, bringing up her omnitool as she left the area.

Bribery was a simple and effective way to get what you wanted, but Aria did not appreciate it when a gesture of good will such as the one she offered to the cleaning crew was in place. It was a matter of respect.

She heard Bray's distinctive footfalls getting closer as Ultaya's got further away, and looked up to see her best bodyguard with a smoking hole in one of his pauldrons.

"Are they dead?" she asked the batarian, and his four eyes followed her gaze to the damage.

"They won't be a problem," he said, and she didn't press him for more information. Bray was her most reliable lieutenant, and if he didn't want to detail anything that wasn't critical to the running of Omega, she wouldn't force him. "Thought you ought to see this, boss."

Aria took the datapad he handed her, glancing over the information. It was a a schedule and notes from a tail that had been put on someone, detailing their movements.

"I think I know why we can't find any information on the Talons new leader: there isn't one."

"No?"

"There's three."

"A triad?" she asked, a little surprised. "Merc gangs don't do group leadership. Even if they try, there's a power struggle sooner rather than later."

"The Talons seem to be making it work. All the intel our sources have gathered indicate they've got an equal share of power and responsibility, and they have since Kandros died."

"I'm surprised Nyreen would leave a council in her place," she muttered, scrolling through the information. "They're still not causing us any problems?"

"They've taken control of two more districts this week. Hada District was commercial and residential, Cerberus flattened it. The Talons have taken it up, none of the other gangs seem to be interested. Ebi District is mostly asari, from what we've gathered it looks like the residents asked the Talons to serve their district after several Blood Pack raids. The Eclipse forces in the area were pretty hard hit during the occupation. There's nothing to suggest the Talons have gone back to red sand dealing. They seem to be keeping to Kandros' vision."

Aria's shoulders twitched with a laugh, a smile barely creasing her mouth. Nyreen would have liked that, knowing there were enough fellow bleeding hearts to keep up her quest to protect the people of Omega.

"Keep tabs on them," Aria said, tossing the datapad down onto the table. "Let me know if they do anything interesting."

"Yes, boss."

Bray lingered, and she turned her gaze on him.

"Something else?"

He didn't betray much, even by batarian's subtle standards, but she could see the nervous lines crease at the corners of his upper eyes. He raised his arm and activated his omnitool, bringing up a three-dimensional recreation of an area of the station, likely rendered from a camera feed. He rotated the scene, and zoomed in.

Sprayed in large letters over the side of a warehouse were words that made Aria's temper flare, and her gut clench with a sudden anxiety she could never admit to.

_**CERBERUS WILL RISE AGAIN** _

_**OMEGA WILL FALL** _


End file.
